I was helping my father move when I found the police report dated January 16, 1989. My heart raced reading it. The report is a detailed description of the car accident that left me in a coma many decades ago.
I had never read it, so I was surprised to see that the report named a witness. Although I had not seen him since that day, I knew exactly who the man was.
I remember clearly the morning of the accident. My boyfriend was leaving for Hollywood with his band, and I was feeling insecure and jealous. I had broken up with him over the phone the night before in a drunken stupor and then fell asleep at my coworker’s house in San Jose, CA.
I woke up the next day disoriented, hungover, and filled with regret. I was desperate to see him before he got on the plane, to tell him it was all a mistake. And so, although there was ice coating the windshield of my 1965 Mustang, I got in the car, rolled down the window, and drove.
There was a light pole at the corner of Hamilton Avenue and Saint Thomas Boulevard. I never saw it coming.
He saw the crash when no one else did and stepped in
Once I found the police report, I decided to hire a private detective to find the witness who saved me. I wrote to him and he responded. He had no idea how badly I had been hurt. There was no blood at all; it just looked as if I had broken my wrist. But if he hadn’t come along when he did, I may not have gotten the help I needed.
Nearly 20 years had passed since that day. I asked him if we could meet, and he said yes.
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When he arrived at the restaurant, I did not recognize his silver hair and bright blue eyes. We talked over a cup of coffee. He said he remembered my car passing him.
“Was I driving in the middle of the road?” I asked.
He said no, but something made him look in the rearview mirror after I passed. “I can’t say what,” he said. That was how he saw me crash into the pole. He stopped, and he thought we should call for help.
“But you just wanted to go on,” he said.
I had no recollection of this, but I had actually refused help. What I do recall is that he propped open the back door of his car and told me to get in, and that I nearly fell as I did so. He then drove me to a nearby Stop & Go gas station, where they called an ambulance.
I had no idea how close I was to dying
At the restaurant, he told me he still remembers the leather jacket with tassels I was wearing. They cut this leather jacket, along with my jeans and cowboy boots, from my body in the ambulance.
At the hospital, an MRI revealed I had internal bleeding where the steering wheel had gouged my stomach. The ER doctor at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center told me they would operate immediately.
There was a tear in my duodenum, and my stomach acids dissolved the stitches, so the doctors put me into a drug-induced coma while they went back in every day to repair the damage stitch by stitch. I woke up four days later, happy to be alive.
Even though I had told him I didn’t want help, this kind stranger had insisted. Who knows what would have happened if he had kept driving? And yet I had never reached out to thank him.
We finally closed a loop that had been open for 20 years
Twenty years later, my savior was still driving the same route to work every morning because has an office nearby. He has a family, too, and I asked if he ever told them about what happened that day. He said he had.
Odd, I said. I could have passed any of them on the street and never known them, and I could have passed him on the street and never known him.
“And I did once,” he said, “pass you on the street.” And we both laughed.
When I tell the story, people say it sounds like he was an angel. But he is a real person, and yet, he is as much an angel as anyone has ever been for me.
